An aspect of the present invention relates, in general, to processing within a computing environment, and in particular, to converting data from one format to another format.
Data may be stored in internal computer storage or external storage in a number of different formats, including in Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange (EBCDIC), American Standard for Information Interchange (ASCII), and decimal floating point, among others.
Different computer architectures support different data formats and may wish to perform operations on a particular format. In such a case, the data, which is in one format, may need to be converted to the desired format.
Further, traditionally, operations used to process numerical decimal data stored in EBCDIC or ASCII formats in databases operate directly on storage. These operations, referred to as storage-to-storage decimal operations, and the performance of these operations are limited by the latency of the memory interface. Each operation that is dependent on the results from a prior operation must wait until the results are written out to storage before it may begin. As the gap between memory latency and processor speed continues to increase, the relative performance of these operations continues to decrease.